Despite me wanting to play League, my last solo queue game was fifteen days ago. Quite odd, no? I can clearly feel—within myself—a want to play the game, yet I do not play it. The simplest answer is that I don’t feel like it. That certainly sounds like a contradiction, but bear with me; it is not.
First and foremost, let’s dive into why I want to play. Well, the game speaks to me, I certainly enjoy the concept of League. I enjoy playing the game—when I am playing it. Each of its little “mini-games” is fun to me. Whether that be CSing, trading, skirmishing or anything like that. I enjoy all those aspects of the game.
But then why is it, that I don’t feel like playing?
A good question, for sure, but answering this one is a little more complicated. First of all I should look at the big obvious answer: anxiety. But here’s the kicker: after having played a bunch more I think I figured out why I feel anxious. I certainly don’t feel anxious three minutes into the game, performance anxiety is almost non-existent at that point. The anxiety is greatest right before pressing that queue button and during champion select. But is it really anxiety? Am I not just confusing a different feeling for anxiety?
I believe I might be. Physiologically, it feels akin to anxiety, but I miss some of the major symptoms: sweaty hands, shallow and/or rapid breathing, faster heart-rate, the list goes on. While some of these symptoms present themselves when starting the queue, none of these are present during champion select.
What is present during champion select is reluctance. Reluctance to play the game, despite me wanting to play it.
Since I haven’t actually played solo queue in a while, I have had quite some time to think. And I have come to the following conclusion: I enjoy playing the game of League, but I do not care for playing its champions. But Jordan, didn’t you have a handful of champions assigned to you to play? Doesn’t that solve this problem? Good question, but no. It does not solve the problem. I don’t feel a want to play these champions, which I believe is the source of this reluctance to play the game. I want to play League, but I do not feel like playing (its champions).
But surely, out of the 163 champions in the game, there has to be one that I feel like playing?
Sure, there are a bunch of champions that speak to me: Ahri, Akali, Yasuo, Irelia, Syndra, Sylas, and Pantheon all speak to me for aesthetic reason (although I must admit that some of these only speak to me like that because of their skins, Ahri most notably—I don’t care for her default skin).
Gameplay-wise, Sion and Ryze speak to me. But I do not care for them aesthetically.
Of course there is some overlap between these lists (e.g. I enjoy the gameplay of Akali too) but even then they only speak to me. That does not necessarily equate to constant enjoyment. And at some point they become “default picks” where I pick them only because I want to play League, and I need to pick a champion to enter a game.
Now a champion doesn’t always need to be fun. There will be times where one doesn’t enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay of their champion (usually when behind and unable to “properly” play the champion). But I have found, very quickly, that whatever champion I decide on playing will become such a “default pick” after about 15-20 games. Without fail, each champion I have decided to play over the past year or so, has become a default pick after roughly that many games. After looking back on it, I noticed it is consistent too.
By no means are the champions poorly designed (well, some of them are in my opinion, looking at you, annoying cat). So then this has to be a me issue, right?
If I look at how I played other competitive games, most notably TEKKEN 7, I notice a similar pattern. Although for TEKKEN, I did spend roughly 400 or so hours playing just one character, admittedly most of that was in practice mode and playing against friends. After that I certainly character-hopped around a lot. But I did always stick to the characters that spoke to me, there are some characters I never played in TEKKEN, simply because they don’t speak to me. Then what about World of Warcraft, I certainly played that quite competitively, enough so to become the #1 Guardian Druid in Mythic+ on my server during the Legion expansion. But even then I played a bunch of other classes at the same time, even going so far as to play all of them quite consistently. Then what about Diablo 3? Now this is the odd-one-out. I only ever play one class during a season and play that for a few weeks (usually reaching somewhere around top two-to-three-hundred on the leaderboard) until I get bored and quit. An argument can be made that if I didn’t quit after getting bored, I would probably class-hop around and play all of the classes anyways, although not to the extent I would play the first class. And what about Valorant? I definitely stuck to Chamber for quite a while, but even there I hopped around between Neon, Jett and Fade too.
So it certainly is a recurring phenomenon. Then why is it I cannot stick to one thing for an extended period of time? Looking at the World of Warcraft example, I seemed to be able to stick to one thing for a longer period of time if I allow myself to play other things concurrently. But I never played the other things at a competitive level; I never felt the need to play the other things at a competitive level.
It has felt like League doesn’t lend itself very well to my natural approach at playing video games. (A.K.A. the Altaholic). Perhaps I either need to put more time aside for it and accept that I won’t climb very fast and just have a bigger champion pool or I’m just not cut out to be properly competitive at League. I need to think more on this, because I know I want to be properly competitive at League, but it’s just so damn hard for me to.
Anyways, it’s getting late. That’s all for today. Good night, future me.